Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise also to contribute to the taking note debate about asylum seekers. As we all know, this is an issue that generates a highly charged political debate, and obviously it is something that those opposite continue to seek to make political mileage out of. It is time that those opposite realised that this is an ongoing challenge that many governments have faced, and they need to do away with the political point-scoring. It does not help. It does not help the issue, it does not help the Australian community and, in the end, it does not help the coalition. The people listening out there to what you have to say on this issue do not agree with you and are not listening to you. The Australian community want their political leaders to work together on this issue. We know that is what they want. They want us to work together and stop the political point-scoring.

To address the asylum seeker challenge, the federal Labor government are getting on with the job of trying to break the people-smuggling business model, because that is what needs to be done. The Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Mr Chris Bowen, announced yesterday, on 21 November, that another group of 100 Sri Lankan men have been sent home. This is the ninth involuntary removal this month and the largest return to Colombo so far. This takes the number of Sri Lankans who have been returned involuntarily since 13 August this year to 426. When voluntary returns are included, a total of 525 have been returned home. The minister has also announced, as those opposite would be aware, that people who arrived by boat post 13 August and future arrivals will have the no-advantage principle applied to their cases onshore, even if they are not transferred offshore for regional processing.

I want to look back to earlier in the year when the political impasse over asylum seekers could not be broken and the parliament voted down measures to stop the tragedies at sea, so the government created the independent expert panel. This panel was set up to provide the government with a report on the best way forward for our nation to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives on dangerous boat journeys to Australia. This panel was made up of retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, Professor Michael L'Estrange and Mr Paris Aristotle. The Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers then released its report containing 22 recommendations on the policy options available to government. In presenting this report, Mr Houston said that the panel had proposed a way forward that it believed would address the challenges that Australia faced over the short, medium and longer term.

The panel's report highlighted that, from late 2001 to June of this year, 964 asylum seekers and crew had been lost at sea, with 604 of these people having lost their lives since October 2009. The report made a number of important points regarding regional cooperation and the regional cooperation framework. The Houston report highlighted that it is fundamentally important that we achieve a regional cooperation framework as a central focus. The report also outlined a number of elements that were required to achieve genuine regional cooperation, including domestic policies that enjoy broad based support and are sustainable over time. (Time expired)